Amanda
Foreman Interview by The Daily NewsWith a single photo, an American scholar
has created quite a stir in Britain:
BY ELLEN TUMPOSKY in LONDON

Writing about the first media celebrity
has made biographer Amanda Foreman something of a celebrity
herself, and she's still reeling from the experience.

Foreman, 31, is the author of "Georgiana, Duchess of
Devonshire" (Random House, $29.95), a biography of Georgiana
Spencer, an 18th-century British aristocrat who was Princess
Diana's great-great-great-great aunt.

It has been a best seller and winner of the prestigious
Whitbread Biography Award in Britain.

"Georgiana" (pronounced "George-jayna")
was the oldest daughter of the first Earl Spencer (Diana's
brother, Charles, the current Earl, is the ninth Spencer
to hold that title). She was just 17 when she married the
enormously powerful and wealthy Duke of Devonshire, a man
as reserved as she was high-spirited.

He didn't let marriage interfere with a longstanding affair
leading one observer to note the paradox that the Duke of
Devonshire was the only man in England not in love with the
duchess.

Georgiana, who lived from 1757 to 1806, dominated London
society roughly during the time of the American Revolution.
She was a popular figure, loved for her charm and ability
to connect with the masses.

The British press soon noticed that reports on her dress
and activities increased sales. She became a trendsetter,
whose hats and dresses were copied by women around the country.
The parallels to Princess Diana are striking, as Foreman
acknowledges. "Georgiana's whole life struggle is to
claw back her sense of self and detach herself from the publicity
she had been generating," says Foreman. "She substituted
applause for a sense of inner happiness."

Reading from her diaries, "You can watch this descent
into madness, into drinking, gambling, bulimia...

"She was all heart, she was like a huge wounded beating
heart, with very little skin covering it."

Foreman never expected her book on a pioneering celebrity
to land its author in the tabloids but that was before she
agreed to pose nude for Tatler, a British society magazine,
with her private parts artfully concealed behind a tower
of books. "I never gave it a moment's thought except
for the fact that I couldn't believe at age 30, anyone was
interested in taking a picture of me without my clothes on.
I thought it was hilarious," says Foreman, sitting in
the living room of her cozy London house, where a copy of
the notorious photo is displayed prominently. She was staggered
at the reaction in the British press. "It was like I
had betrayed my genre of biography," she recalls. "What
am I doing, taking my clothes off and being frivolous?"

But then Foreman is not your typical biographer.

The daughter of an English mother and an American father
Carl Foreman, who wrote "High Noon," "The
Guns of Navarone," "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and
many other films she was born in London after her father
was blacklisted during the 1950s.

In the mid-'70s, when Hollywood began to welcome back the
victims of McCarthyism, the family returned to Los Angeles.
But Foreman was nostalgic for England and pushed to attend
boarding school there at the age of 10.

"It was just hell. I could not have been a bigger fish
out of water, Americanized, Hollywood, with these girls who
were children of English colonels and farmers' daughters.
I had this sign on my forehead that said "Bully me and
it didn't leave until I was 18."

Her grades were so bad that 25 colleges in America and Britain
rejected her, but the 26th Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville said
yes and changed her life. She thrived in college and came
to Oxford to do graduate work. Researching attitudes toward
race in 18th-century London, she was reading a biography
of the English politician Charles Grey and encountered Georgiana,
Grey's lover after her marriage.

Foreman says she herself was madly in love with two men
at Oxford at the time and identified with Georgiana, who
was living with the duke but desperately in love with Grey. "I
thought I needed to find out more about her and how she resolved
her own situation," she explains.

Once she passed her driving test (after six failures), Foreman
began to track down Georgiana's history in trips to English
stately homes like Althorp, the Spencer estate where Diana
lived as a girl, and Chatsworth, still the family seat of
the Duke of Devonshire. She became obsessed with the Duchess. "I
dreamt about her every night; I had imaginary conversations
with her. There wasn't room for anybody else then. I just
assumed that would be my life."

But when she met an English banker working in New York, "it
was like someone turned the lights on." They are now
engaged and live in Greenwich Village, with Foreman travelling
every month or so to London.

She loves New York, but has a strong tie to England, which
welcomed her father when America shunned him.

Her father, who died when she was 16, is an overwhelming
influence. "When I was about 12, he approached me with
a history book and said, 'I'd love you to read this book." She
rebelliously refused, but now says, "He was planting
these seeds, hoping that if he died before I grew up, I might
remember these things."

Her book is dedicated to him "in
the certain knowledge that, had he lived, by now we,
too, would be friends.